No great Russian writer – except perhaps Andrey Platonov – was as unostentatiously practical as Chekhov, and the huge number of trees he planted testifies to the inseparability of his love of beauty and his concern for the useful. Rosamund Bartlett tells us that ‘Chekhov once made a note about the Muslim custom of digging wells to save one’s soul, adding: “It would be good if each of us left a school or a well or something similar, so that our lives did not go by… without trace.”’3 Chekhov himself built no less than three schools, but I am still more struck by the reference to digging a well. Chekhov did not, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, leave us vast cathedrals of words; his plays and stories are, however, at least a little like wells – modest, mysterious, and as necessary as they are inexhaustible.
IN THE CART
They left town at half past eight in the morning.
The road was dry and the beautiful April sun was very warm, but there was still snow lying in the ditches and in the forest. The long, dark, mean winter was not long past and spring had arrived suddenly, but neither the sunshine, nor the thin listless forests warmed by the breath of spring, nor the black flocks flying over enormous puddles which were like lakes in the fields, nor the glorious sky into whose boundless expanses one could have joyously disappeared seemed new or interesting to Marya Vasilyevna sitting there in the cart. She had been a teacher for thirteen years and had lost count of the number of times she had travelled to town for her wages; whether it was spring, like now, or a rainy autumn evening, or winter – it was all the same to her, and each time she only ever wanted one thing: to get the trip over as quickly as possible.
She felt as if she had been living in these parts for ages and ages, a hundred years at least, and it seemed as if she knew every single stone and every single tree on the road from the town to her school. Here was her past and her present and she could imagine no other future than school, the journey to town and back, more school, the journey again…
She had already got out of the habit of remembering her life before she became a schoolteacher, and had forgotten almost everything about it. At one point she had a father and mother; they lived in Moscow near the Red Gates, in a large apartment, but all that was left of that life was a dim blurred memory, like a dream. Her father had died when she was ten years old, and her mother had died soon after… Her brother was an officer and they had corresponded at first, but then he got out of the habit of writing and stopped answering her letters. All she had left from her former possessions was a photograph of her mother, but it had faded because the school was so damp, and now all you could see was her hair and her eyebrows.
When they had travelled a few miles, old Semyon, who was holding the reins, turned round and said, ‘They’ve arrested an official in town. Sent him off to jail. People are saying apparently he and some Germans killed Mayor Alekseyev in Moscow.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘People were reading about it in the newspaper at Ivan Ionov’s inn.’
Then they were silent again for a long time. Marya Vasilyevna was thinking about her school and about the exam coming up at which she would be presenting four boys and one girl. And just as she was thinking about exams, Khanov the landowner overtook her in his four-horse carriage – the same man who had examined at her school the year before. As he drew level he recognized her and nodded his head in greeting.
‘Hello there!’ he said. ‘You homeward bound?’
This man Khanov, who was about forty and had a haggard face and a sluggish expression, had already begun to age noticeably, but he was still handsome and attractive to women. He lived by himself on his large estate and did not have a job; people said that he did nothing at home except play chess with his old servant and walk around whistling. People also said that he drank a lot. In fact, at the exams last year, even the papers he brought with him stank of wine and cologne. Everything he had worn then was brand new and Marya Vasilyevna had been very attracted to him; she had felt completely tongue-tied while she was sitting next to him. She had grown used to cold and formal examiners at her school, but this one could not remember a single prayer and did not know what questions to ask; he was exceptionally polite and considerate and gave everyone top marks.
‘I’m on my way to see Bakvist,’ he continued, turning to Marya Vasilyevna, ‘but I’ve heard he is not at home!’
They turned off the highway on to the road leading to the village, Khanov in front and Semyon following behind. Khanov’s four horses plodded along the road, straining to drag the heavy carriage through the mud. Semyon, meanwhile, was weaving about, going over hillocks and through the meadows in order to avoid the road, and he kept having to get off the cart to help the horses. Marya Vasilyevna was still thinking about school and whether the exam would be difficult or easy. And she was feeling annoyed with the local zemstvo1 because there had been no one in the office when she stopped by the day before. What disorder! She had been asking them for two years now to dismiss the caretaker, who did not do his job, was rude to her and beat the schoolchildren, but no one ever listened to her. It was difficult to get hold of the head of the zemstvo when he was at work, and even when you did, he would just tell you with tears in his eyes that he was too busy; the school inspector came only once every three years and did not understand anything because he had worked in excise before and had got the job through the back door; the board of trustees met very infrequently and no one knew where they met; the school’s trustee was an uneducated peasant who ran a tanning business and was rude, slow-witted and in cahoots with the caretaker, so goodness knows to whom she was supposed to address complaints and enquiries…
‘He really is goodlooking,’ she thought, glancing at Khanov.
The road was getting worse and worse. They had entered a forest. There was nowhere to turn off here, the ruts were very deep and there was gurgling water streaming along them. Prickly branches were hitting her face.
‘How do you like the road?’ asked Khanov with a laugh.
The teacher looked at him and could not understand why this odd person lived here. What possible use was there for his money, his interesting appearance and his fine manners in this boring, muddy place in the middle of nowhere? He was not getting anything out of life, and here he was just like Semyon, having to plod along this frightful road and putting up with the same discomforts. Why did he live here when he could live in Petersburg or abroad? And you would have thought a rich man like him might have considered it worth improving this dreadful road so as not to have to put up with this nightmare, and not have to see the despair etched on the faces of his driver and Semyon; but he just laughed; he clearly could not care less and had no interest in living better. He was a gentle, naïve and kind man who did not understand this crude life, and his knowledge of it was as poor as his knowledge of the prayers they said at exams. All he gave the school were globes of the world, and he genuinely thought he was being useful and doing a lot to improve national education. But what use were his globes here!
‘Hold tight, Vasilyevna!’ said Semyon.
The cart tilted heavily and almost keeled over; something heavy fell on to Marya Vasilyevna’s feet – it was her shopping. Now there was a steep climb up the hill through mud as thick as clay; noisy streams were running down the winding ditches, and it was as if the water had been eating away at the road – travelling round here was dreadful! The horses were snorting. Khanov climbed out of his carriage and started walking along the edge of the road. He was hot.
‘How do you like the road?’ Khanov asked again with a laugh. ‘My carriage is going to be wrecked at this rate.’
‘No one is making you travel in weather like this, are they?’ said Semyon severely. ‘You should have stayed at home.’
‘It’s boring at home, old man. I don’t like staying at home.’
He seemed slim and sprightly next to old Semyon, but there was something in his bearing, barely noticeable, which gave him away as a person who was already done for, weak and close
to ruin. And just then the forest suddenly started smelling of wine. Marya Vasilyevna started to feel afraid and sorry for this person who was going into decline for no apparent reason, and it occurred to her that if she was his wife or his sister she would probably devote her whole life to saving him from ruin. If she was his wife? Life had ordained that he should live on his own on his large estate and she should live on her own in a remote village, but even just the thought that she and he could be equals and intimate with each other seemed impossible and ridiculous for some reason. Life was generally arranged in such an incomprehensible way and relationships with people were so complicated that you ended up feeling terrified, with your heart sinking, however you looked at it.
‘And it’s impossible to understand,’ she thought, ‘why God gives beauty and charm, and such sweet, sad eyes to such useless, weak and unhappy people, and why they are so attractive.’
‘We’re turning to the right here,’ said Khanov as he got into his carriage. ‘Goodbye then! All the best!’
And again she started thinking about her pupils, about the exam, about the caretaker and the board of trustees; and when the wind brought the sound of the receding carriage over from the right, these thoughts started mingling with the previous ones. She wanted to think about beautiful eyes, about love, about the happiness she would never have…
Be a wife? It was cold in the morning, there was no one to light the stove, the caretaker was never there; the schoolchildren would start arriving at first light, bringing snow and mud and noise; everything was so uninviting and cheerless. Her home was just one room with a kitchen in it. Her head ached every day after classes, and after dinner she felt a burning sensation in her chest. She had to collect money from her pupils for firewood and for the caretaker, take it to the school trustee, and then beg that self-satisfied, brazen peasant to be so kind as to deliver the firewood. Then at night she would dream of exams, peasants and snowdrifts. And this life had aged her and made her coarse and unattractive, she had become awkward and clumsy, as if she were filled with lead; she was afraid of everything, and in the presence of a councillor or the school trustee she would stand up, not daring to sit down again, and when she referred to them in conversation she would be needlessly deferential. No one liked her, and her life was passing by miserably, without affection, without the sympathy of friends and without any interesting acquaintances. What a terrible thing it would be if she fell in love in her position!
‘Hold on tight, Vasilyevna!’
Another steep climb up a hill…
She had trained as a teacher out of necessity rather than any sense of vocation; she had never actually thought about a vocation, or the benefits of learning; it had always seemed to her that the most important thing in her job was not pupils or education but exams. And anyway, when did she have the time to think about a vocation or the benefits of learning? With all the work they have to do, teachers, hard-up doctors and medical assistants never even have the consolation of thinking that they are devoting themselves to an ideal or helping the people, because their heads are always full of thoughts about firewood, getting enough to eat, bad roads and illnesses. Life is difficult and uninteresting, and only docile cart-horses like Marya Vasilyevna put up with it long term; lively, sensitive, impressionable people who talk about their vocation and dedication to ideals soon become worn out and give up.
Semyon was doing his best to drive on ground that was dryer, taking short cuts through the fields and backways; but either the peasants did not always let them through or there was the priest’s land and that was no thoroughfare or there was the land that Ivan Ionov had bought from the landowner and dug a trench around. Sometimes they had to turn back.
They arrived at the little town of Lower Gorodishche. Near the inn, on ground strewn with manure, underneath which there was still snow, stood carts which had been transporting large drums of oil of vitriol. There were a lot of people in the inn, all drivers, and it smelt of vodka, tobacco and sheepskin. The conversation was loud and the weighted door kept slamming. Behind the partition in the shop someone was playing an accordion continually. Marya Vasilyevna sat drinking tea, while at the next table some peasants were drinking vodka and beer, red-faced from all the tea they had drunk and the stuffiness in the inn.
‘Hey, Kuzma!’ some unruly voices shouted out. ‘What’s going on? God save us! Ivan Dementyich, I can sort things! You watch out!’
A small peasant with a short black beard and a pitted face, long drunk, was suddenly taken off guard by something; he let out a string of curses.
‘What’s all that swearing for? Hey, you!’ Semyon called out angrily from the far corner where he was sitting. ‘Surely you can see there’s a lady here!’
‘A lady…’ mimicked someone in the opposite corner.
‘You swine!’
‘Look, we didn’t mean any harm,’ said the small peasant in embarrassment. ‘Sorry. We’ll keep to our patch, and let the lady do the same. Good morning to you!’
‘Hello,’ said the teacher.
‘Thank you most kindly.’
Marya Vasilyevna enjoyed her tea and went red in the face like the peasants, and she started thinking again about the firewood and the caretaker…
‘Hang on!’ came a voice from the next table. ‘She’s the teacher from Vyazovye… we know her! She’s a good lady.’
‘Honourable!’
The weighted door kept banging as people came in and out. Marya Vasilyevna sat and thought about the same old things while the accordion played on behind the partition. There were patches of sunshine on the floor; then they transferred to the counter and onto the wall, and then they completely disappeared, which meant the sun had crept past midday. The peasants at the next table started getting ready to move. Tottering slightly, the small peasant went up to Marya Vasilyevna and shook her hand; seeing this, the others also shook her hand to say goodbye as they left one by one, and the door squeaked and banged ten times.
‘Come on, Vasilyevna, time to get going,’ called Semyon.
They set off. And again they had to walk.
‘They built a school here not long ago, in Lower Gorodishche,’ said Semyon, turning round. ‘That was a bad business!’
‘Why?’
‘Apparently the zemstvo chief pocketed a thousand, and the trustee took a thousand too, and the teacher got five hundred.’
‘But building a whole school only costs a thousand. It’s not good to speak ill of people. That’s all nonsense.’
‘I don’t know… That’s what people said.’
But it was clear that Semyon did not believe the teacher. The peasants never believed her; they thought she was paid far too much – twenty-one roubles a month (when five would have been enough), and they thought that she kept most of the money she collected to pay for firewood and the caretaker. The trustee thought the same as all the peasants; he earned a bit on the side himself from the firewood, and he received a salary from the peasants for being trustee, which was something the authorities did not know about.
The forest had come to an end, thank goodness, and now it was flat all the way to Vyazovye. And there was not much further to go; they had to cross the river, then the railway line, and Vyazovye was immediately after that.
‘Where are you going?’ Marya Vasilyevna asked Semyon. ‘You ought to take the road to the right, over the bridge.’
‘What? We’ll be all right this way. It’s not too deep.’
‘Watch out, we don’t want to drown the horse.’
‘What?’
‘There’s Khanov going across the bridge,’ said Marya Vasilyevna, seeing a horse and four a long way over to the right. ‘That is him, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, that’s him. Bakvist can’t have been at home. What a fool he is, heaven help us, going that way for no good reason, when it’s two miles shorter this way.’
They arrived at the river. In summer it was not much more than a stream, which was easy enough to ford and had usually dried up
by August, but now after the floods it was a river about forty feet across, fast-flowing, turbulent and cold, and there were fresh tracks on the bank by the water’s edge – people had obviously been crossing here.
‘Giddy up!’ shouted Semyon angrily and with anxiety, pulling hard on the reins and waving his elbows up and down like a bird flapping its wings; ‘Giddy up!’
The horse walked into the water up to its belly and stopped, then started again at once, straining every muscle, and Marya Vasilyevna felt a sharp coldness in her feet.
‘Giddy up!’ she also shouted out, as she stood up. ‘Come on, giddy up!’
They reached the other bank.
‘And anyway, what’s the point of all this, for heaven’s sake?’ mumbled Semyon, adjusting the harness. ‘It’s downright murder having to deal with that zemstvo.’
Her shoes and galoshes were full of water, the bottom of her dress and her coat and one of her sleeves were dripping wet, and the sugar and flour were sodden – that was more upsetting than everything else and Marya Vasilyevna just threw up her hands in despair and said, ‘Ah, Semyon, Semyon!… Really!’
The barrier was lowered at the railway crossing: the express train was coming from the station. Marya Vasilyevna stood by the crossing and waited for the train to pass, her whole body trembling with cold. You could already see Vyazovye – the school with its green roof, and the church with its crosses blazing as they reflected the evening sun; the windows in the station were also blazing, and there was pink smoke coming from the train engine… And it seemed to her that everything was shivering with cold.
Here was the train: its windows were flooded with bright light like the crosses on the church, and it hurt to look at them. On the platform at the end of one of the first-class carriages stood a lady and Marya Vasilyevna glanced at her fleetingly: it was her mother! What a resemblance! Her mother had the same luxuriant hair, the same forehead, and her head was inclined in the same way. And with amazing clarity, for the first time in all these thirteen years, she was able vividly to remember her mother and father, her brother, the apartment in Moscow, the aquarium with the little fish and everything else down to the smallest detail; suddenly she heard the sound of the piano and her father’s voice; she felt as if she was young, pretty and well-dressed in a bright, warm room, surrounded by her family, as she had been then; a feeling of joy and happiness suddenly enveloped her and she pressed her palms to her temples in rapture and called out softly in supplication:
Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics) Page 20